ROAD RAGE

For the past few months (well, ever since he learned to crawl, actually), James has been suffering from an increasingly bad case of Road Rage. It all started when his little yellow safari car would flip over while he was trying to push it. Then his train started acting up. Next thing we knew, he was mad at his books because he couldn't "drive" them around the room. When he upgraded to pushing his larger toys, they would often turn the wrong direction, tip over, or get stuck. And now that he walks behind those larger toys, he gets REALLY mad if they don't do what he wants them to do:

It's OK if you laughed at this. We do (on the inside only, of course - we wouldn't want to hurt the baby's feelings). We used to rush to "fix" the situation, but now we just try to talk him through it: "You can do it", "Flip it over", "Turn it around", "Books don't have wheels", etc. He's learning, but it still takes him longer than he'd like to fix these unfavorable situations. And as our friend Dawn enlightened us, this frustrated/impatient behavior tends to be strongest during teething. Since James is currently getting 5 teeth at once (the top 2 molars are breaking through bit-by-bit, the bottom molars have JUST started to push to the surface, and that other bottom tooth on the right side is coming in too), he's especially annoyed with his toys right now. Poor kid - he's doubling his number of teeth in a matter of a couple of weeks...